It's April, Remember?

It's fun to camp, and Ruffles has been depressed since the delivery. Companionship seems to help. Well, companionship that doesn't eat her grain, anyway. It's a little tight in there for Ruffles, the kids and me, but Ruffles does like to snuggle. No, really.

So I have been sleeping out in the goat house. Last night it rained. A lot. And I was reminded I should have put a plastic liner under an old tarp like this. I had over estimated the water proofness of that blue tarp. I got dripped on all night. I contemplated going inside, but I was warm and dry inside my sleeping system, so I weathered it. In the morning I awoke to snow on the ground. Maybe I should have gone in.

The other morning I tore down half of the winter chicken house, flopped the panels over the fence and reassembled it as a two ended goat shelter. With this, I have two nursery shelters and a main shelter. We have a delivery due any moment and another at the end of the week. Pretty soon, Little, the whether, will be the only adult not nursing kids. In there is a bed of coarse wood chips and straw on top of that. It gets everybody up off the ground, keeping them warm and dry. Even the drips last night didn't really get the area wet. This morning I salvaged a piece of plastic from the chicken house and used it to line the tarp to stop the drip. I'll find out tonight how effective it is.


It has been really nice weather for more than a week. Into the seventies in early April.



The Sunny weather was helping Ruffles ward off the blues. I'll have to pay attention to her to get throuhg this wet weather.

Field Milkhouse

That's our field milk house.

For a while in the spring I was walking the does up and down from the backfield to the barn for milkings. It was a pain, and invited disaster. It was a time consuming, we had to go by plants the goats liked but we didn't want them to eat and there was opportunity for mishap at every turn. There is a better way.

So I brought the milking stanchion up to the backfield and put it under a tarp covered stock panel arch. It gave me a place to hang the scale, store milking supplies and keep everything dry.

To improve on that, I built the field milk house. It's a hemlock deck (locally sawn, hemlocks the best choice available from my rough sawn guy). It has uprights for attaching the arch and is built on skids so I can pick up the whole thing on my loader forks, carry it to a new location and set it down. The skids also keep the rest of it out of the dirt so it will last longer.

It is certainly nice bringing the house to the animals instead of the other way around. Much faster and more productive. And it gives me a dry place to store nik nacs in the field. I moved it this afternoon for the first time. As advertised, slid under it with the forks, lift and carry.

Kinda of proud of myself

I have written here and here about stock panel arch buildings we use. It is a simple adaptable design for out building that is easy and inexpensive to put up. Made from arched sections of 52" X 16 foot that create a variable length building 8 feet wide and six feet tall. With a 6mil plastic or poly tarp skin and some internal stays, it creates a dry shed that can withstand our VT snow loads. As solar heated green houses, they extend our growing season a month in the spring and a month plus in the fall. As animal shelters, they provide shelter from wind and rain, retain body heat and gather solar energy to make comfortable winter housing.




















The Goat house is a little more elaborate than the Green houses. The Goat house has a human end and a goat end with seperate entrances. The Goat end is half open, half covered by a canvas tarp. There is also a wall of old hay bales on the closed side. The hay feeder is hung on the wall between the goat and human ends. The Human end gives us a place to store feed hay and hay waste. We can load and cycle the feeder from the human side. Their are also two slots for the goats to reach through for water and minerals. And brackets to hang mini feeders of grain on.



















For the Goat shed, we had some new design constraints to meet. We wanted clear spans inside (no supporting posts) given the limited space. With such a thin wall, condensation can be an issue. Since goats are suseptable to pneumonia, keeping their housing dry was important. We also wanted to maintain a solar warming design. So the sunny side has a layer of translucent plastic and the shadowed side has a layer of heavy canvas. The Canvas helps buffer the condesation while the clear side allows the heat of the sun in. For cold or foul weather, there is a poly tarp that covers the whole goat end. The canvas stretches around the open end and can be positioned to suit the weather. Now that the sun has changed it's swing enough, the tarp stays open most of the time to catch the afternoon sun.















Today was a good day to drag out the old bedding and replace it with new. It just means going into the goat end with a wheel barrow and pitch fork and loading up the soiled bedding. We compost the bedding to add to the vegetable gardens. Even in the depth of winter, the compost generated enough heat to melt it's way through the snow. We change the bedding on a schedule to interupt parasites. We replaced the old bedding with a new layer that is the waste hay we collect from the hay feeder. Goats a picky eaters and only eat about half of the hay that we put out.

Exciting news

We had the vet over the other day. And not for lunch....

We are coming up on a year with our goats and it was time to get some injections, preventative care for the hopefully pregnant goats. I also wanted to get tested for CAE (the goats, not me). I also wanted the vet's professional opinion of the health and general condition of the goats. I am still developing a critical eye for goat flesh.

One of the things that has been nagging us is whether or not our goats are actually pregnant. I have been poking and prodding them looking for a sign one way or the other, but I haven't been convinced. But I had to dry them off (stop their udders from producing milk) two months prior to the assumed due date. That was about a month ago. Ever since, I have been thinking about "what if they aren't pregnant" They wouldn't go into heat again until fall and kid spring of 2009. That would mean all the work around maintaining and feeding them with no milk for more than a year. That would have been a big disappointment since dairy products is the reason we got the goats. I enjoy the girls, but they are a big responsibility. Without the milk it wouldn't be worth it.

So anyway, the vet did an ultrasound and we confirmed both goats are with kid. Hard to tell if it is one kid or more, but at least one each. So be looking for pictures of new kids come May.

A sunny day in the snow

Have I talked about our cattle panel goat shelter? (CPS) I generally call it the goat cave. It consits of several 16' sections of cattle panel fence bent over lengthwise to form an arch. We use bail ties as internal stays to keep the arch in shape and support any snow load. For the summer, it has a tarp canopy to keep the rain off.

But in the winter, we get a little more elaborate. The outer shell over the goat half is the silver polly tarp. Under that is a layer of translucent plastic. On the north side the inner layer is a canvas tarp that can also cover the open south end in foul weather. The canvas helps buffer condensation and keeps things more confortable for the goats. On a nice day like today, we roll up the outer poly tarp on the southeast side to let the warm sun in. That's the point of today's post.

When we woke up this morning temps were about ten degrees. They had risen to about 32 when I took pictures. In that same time period, the goat cave had risen to almost seventy degrees. Passive solar gain in action.




















It's not like the Goat Cave can hold anything like that over night. The South end of the shelter is generally at least half open, so fresh air is always breezing in. This helps prevent moisture and ammonia from building up. But inspite of that open door, the bedding in the goat side never freezes.